Matte Painting

All the Detail You’ll Ever Want

As a matte painter, you know how hard it is to create rich and detailed natural scenery. Jungles, forests, terrains… reproducing the complexity of nature requires a lot of work and attention to detail. And if you do it in 3D, it will also require huge polygon counts, which will slow most 3D programs to a crawl.

VUE is a matte painter’s heaven. With sophisticated features such as EcoSystem painting, procedural terrains, Spectral atmospheres, and SolidGrowth plants, it handles even the most demanding, highly-detailed environments with unmatched ease. Give it a go, and you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it!

The Power of VUE - From the Ground Up

Whether you use 3D landscapes as a base for further 2D painting, or create everything in 3D, whether you just need a few trees in the foreground or want to produce a gigantic forest and mountain panorama, VUE will do the job.

Here’s an example of a typical workflow for matte painting:

Shaping the landscape

Choose standard terrains for easy manipulation and editing.

Use pressure-sensitive brushes to interactively carve the terrain or add geological features such as erosion.

Use procedural terrains for unlimited level of detail (dynamically updated depending on the distance from the camera).

Adding the detail

Vue’s revolutionary EcoSystem technology has set new standards for 3D programs. EcoSystem generation 2 takes this revolution even further, with interactive EcoSystem painting and editing (using mouse or pressure-sensitive tablet).

Plants trees and rocks are procedurally “grown” inside the software, which means that no two plants of the same species look exactly alike.

Setting up the lighting and atmosphere

Choose from standard, volumetric, Spectral or environment based atmospheric models.

Network rendering of hi-res images

HyperVue™ automatically handles the network rendering of large images by distributing tiles to the render nodes on your network.

Matte painting with VUE at Industrial Light & Magic

"Digital matte painting is becoming more complex with each new show,
and creating a photo-realistic organic environment digitally
has always been a big challenge."

"VUE gives us total flexibility to do such works, and it
only took us a few days to learn! We were able to create awesome images
right away. Whenever we are asked to change the lighting or camera
angle, it's simply a matter of re-rendering with a different lighting or
camera instead of having to re-paint it all over!"

Susumu Yukuhiro, Digital Matte Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic.

Setting the Scope

Gener8Xion Entertainment has chosen VUE for many of their outdoor CG shots, where they are creating virtual second unit landscapes and terrains for their upcoming feature film, "One Night with the King".

"Vue's ability to generate large photo-realistic environments is really going to help set the scope of this film.”